The World for Sale Quotes

“The commodity traders are arbitragers par excellence, trying to exploit a series of differences in prices. Because they’re doing deals to buy and to sell all the time, they are often indifferent to whether commodity prices overall go up or down. What matters to them is the price disparity – between different locations, different qualities or forms of a product, and different delivery dates. By exploiting these price differences, they help to make markets more efficient, directing resources to their highest value uses in response to price signals. They are, in the words of one academic, the visible manifestation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources

“Agricultural commodity traders, on the other hand, buy from thousands of individual farmers. That makes the traders’ job harder, but it also provides an opportunity: dealing with so many farmers gives the largest traders valuable information. Long before the concept of ‘big data’ became popular, the agricultural traders were putting it to work, aggregating information from thousands of farmers to get a real-time insight into the state of the markets.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Most of us take for granted the ease with which we can fill up our cars, buy a new smartphone or order a cup of Colombian coffee. But underpinning almost all of our consumption is a frenetic international trade in natural resources. And underpinning that trade, from their offices in sleepy towns in Switzerland or New England, are the commodity traders.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“In the decade to 2011, the world’s largest oil, metal and agricultural trading houses – Vitol, Glencore and Cargill, respectively – enjoyed a combined net income of $76.3 billion (see table on page 332). That was an astonishing amount of money. It was ten times the profits the traders were generating in the 1990s.16 It was more than either Apple or Coca-Cola made over the same period.17 And it would have been enough money to buy entire titans of corporate America, such as Boeing or Goldman Sachs.18”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“There’s no way to do business in the Third World without enriching government leaders,’ said Calil. He explained how the practice of greasing the palms of African potentates evolved: ‘You used to give a dictator a suitcase of dollars; now you give a tip on your stock shares, or buy a housing estate from his uncle or mother for ten times its worth.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Glasenberg’s bet on buying assets a decade earlier now helped to deliver profits for Glencore that surpassed even Marc Rich’s golden years. In 2003, the company’s net income exceeded $1 billion for the first time, and the following year it was more than $2 billion, and in 2007 the trading house made $6.1 billion.38”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“But in coal, with no futures market, there was nowhere to place a bet on rising prices. The only way was to buy entire mines. So that’s what Glasenberg did. Over the next four years he bought more than a dozen mines in Australia and South Africa, in addition to deals in Colombia.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Either you’re in the family or you’re out,’ says one former Glencore employee. ‘After I said I was leaving, Ivan didn’t speak to me again.’23”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Eventually, a consultant came up with the name Glencore, a contraction of the words global, energy, commodities and resources. On 1 September 1994, Marc Rich + Co officially became Glencore International, and, two months later, the company announced it had severed all ties with its fugitive founder.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Little noticed and little scrutinised, the commodity traders have become essential cogs in the modern economy. Without them, petrol stations would run out of fuel, factories would grind to a halt and bakeries would run out of flour.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Agricultural commodity traders, on the other hand, buy from thousands of individual farmers. That makes the traders’ job harder, but it also provides an opportunity: dealing with so many farmers gives the largest traders valuable information. Long before the concept of ‘big data’ became popular, the agricultural traders were putting it to work, aggregating information from thousands of farmers to get a real-time insight into the state of the markets. Each month, when the US Department of Agriculture published its update on the world’s key crops, the agricultural houses’ traders were able to bet on what it would say with near-certainty that they were right. Within most trading houses, there was a group of traders whose sole job was to speculate profitably with the company’s money – they were known as the proprietary, or ‘prop’, traders.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources

“That was not all. When the Jamaican government wanted to buy the country’s oil refinery from an Exxon subsidiary, Marc Rich + Co lent it the money. The trading company even helped to fund Jamaica’s team at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and paid for it to send a bobsled team to participate in the 1988 Winter Olympics – whose unlikely journey to the Games was chronicled in the Disney film Cool Runnings.15”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources

“Washington financed billions of dollars of exports, helping to spread the American diet around the world. And the grain traders helped deliver this wave of American grain: Cargill quadrupled the volume of its American grain exports between 1955 and 1965.17”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources

“investments in corn mills, soybean crushers and meat-packing plants, which are far outperforming its trading business.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources

“Os traders não se sentiam mais como parceiros em um empreendimento comercial empolgante e com a chance de assumir a empresa um dia, mas sim como servos contratados obedecendo às ordens de um mestre distante. Rich, o prodígio da Philipp Brothers que havia saído da empresa porque Jesselson não quis lhe dar a sua parte justa dos ganhos da empresa ou não lhe permitia a liberdade de negociar da maneira que queria, estava repetindo os mesmos erros na própria empresa. “Não se trata apenas de dinheiro… trata-se de dinheiro, trata-se de um sentimento de pertencimento, trata-se de um sentimento de ter algo a dizer sobre como a empresa está sendo organizada”,”
― Javier Blas, O mundo à venda: Dinheiro, poder e os traders que negociam os recursos do planeta

“The first is the democratisation of information. For decades, the commodity trading houses enjoyed a tremendous information advantage over the rest of the market. Their vast networks of offices around the world provided them with up-to-the-minute intelligence about economic activity, commodity supply and demand, and a multitude of other data. If workers at a key copper mine in Chile went on strike or if a new oilfield started producing in Nigeria, the traders would be the first to know. In many cases, they built their own telecommunications networks at a time when long-distance phone calls had to be booked well in advance”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Switzerland also dragged its feet in prosecuting bribery of foreign government officials. Its first foreign corruption case against a company in Switzerland came only in 2011.15 And the penalties, beyond public shame, remained very low. For companies whose employees bribe a foreign official, the maximum penalty is five million Swiss francs, plus forfeiture of profit. The IMF has described the fines as ‘not effective, proportionate or dissuasive’.16”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“But some, notably Switzerland, were extremely slow to act. Paying bribes to foreign officials was not only widely accepted within the business community, but the bribes were even tax deductible. It was only in 2016 that Swiss companies stopped being able to claim a tax credit against the bribes they had paid to businesspeople abroad, with the approval of new legislation.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Of all the commodity trading houses, however, it is the agricultural traders whose business model has traditionally relied the most on speculation.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“He says that Khodorkovsky made two mistakes. The first was to ignore Putin’s warning not to meddle in Russian politics. The second was his talks to sell Yukos to a US oil company. ‘You can imagine the anger. These guys got this for free. They didn’t pay for this: they got it. And they’re now going to sell it to an American multinational?”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Buying mines was one way to address the issue: now Glencore’s traders would have a guaranteed flow of commodities to sell, without having to outbid their competitors to secure them. ‘I’ve always said, pure commodity trading without the assets backing up the trading is very difficult,’ Glasenberg says today.25 It was one thing to buy a few coal mines.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“In between the two extremes, there’s a sweet spot for commodities demand. After per capita income rises above $4,000, countries typically industrialise and urbanise, creating a strong, and sometimes disproportionate, relationship between further economic growth and extra commodity demand. China hit the commodity sweet spot around the time that Davis wrote his Xstrata memo: its GDP per capita reached $3,959 in 2001.6 Davis’s analysis wasn’t based on detailed economic modelling, but he knew from his travels there that something big was happening in China that could supercharge the commodity markets”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“The plan dreamt up by Taylor and the other traders was to update the Soviet-era sugar-for-oil deal for the capitalist age. The traders would, in effect, take on the role that had previously been played by Moscow. They would agree to buy Cuba’s sugar months in advance of the harvest, providing desperately needed financing to the Cuban government. And Havana, in turn, would use that credit to buy oil and fuel from the traders. Then Cuba would pay the traders with the sugar, closing the loop.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“By the early 1990s it had some $9 billion.26 And so, under the watch of chief financial officer Henri B. Meier, Roche set about putting its cash pile in an array of investments that had nothing to do with pharmaceuticals. That was how, in 1994, thanks to an introduction by Marc Rich’s financial adviser Heinz Pauli, the pharmaceutical company came to Strothotte’s rescue. Unlike Ebner, Roche had no interest in how the company was run – it just wanted to make money. Strothotte agreed to sell 15% of the company’s shares for about $150 million, with a promise to buy them back at a later date and a guarantee that Roche would receive a certain return on its investment.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“But that was no problem – Phibro Energy had, since 1981, been part of Salomon Brothers, the result of a traumatic merger that had defined the business for much of the 1980s. As a result, Hall had access to one of the biggest credit lines on Wall Street. At the peak, he was sitting on oil worth some $600 million – more than 37 million barrels at the price of the”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“This type of deal, exchanging a raw material for a finished product, was called ‘tolling’ and had been used before in oil and zinc, but Marc Rich + Co brought it to the aluminium sector.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“In Switzerland it was even possible to account for the ‘facilitation fees’, as the bribes were often called in corporate-speak, as tax deductible expenses.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“Whether there’s crisis, or threat, or things that are high risk, that means there’s opportunity.’26”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources